Beyond the Scenery
by HushBugger
Summary: Instead of reaching the surface, the monsters and Frisk pass through the walls of reality. It turns out that they're characters in a video game on a smartphone.
1. Chapter 1

**I.**

Nearly everyone had been wondering what the surface would be like.

Asgore and Toriel had known the surface, once upon a time, but knew it would be near-unrecognizable. The geography would be the same, mostly, but they couldn't count on more than that. In a way, they were the best prepared. You don't live for centuries without getting used to change.

Undyne had fantasized extensively about the surface, but recent events disrupted that. Her dreams hadn't completed the adjustment from full human extinction to peaceful coexistence just yet, and now existed in a halfway state, a befuddling mix of war and unity. At least they still featured humans, as always, even if the roles were shifting.

Alphys's idea of the surface contained massive inaccuracies, partially because they weren't in Japan.

Papyrus's expectations were uniquely his. He knew about many surface things, such as cars, the sun, stars, the horizon, the Queen of England, pure spring water, bamboo trees, parking meters, cumulonimbus clouds, trash compactors, plastic straws, bunnies, quasars, and all-you-can-eat pizzerias. He didn't know how they fit together, but he anticipated encountering many of them.

Sans just wanted to smell fresh rain, feel the drops on his skull, and get soaking wet. More than that would be welcome, but he didn't dare hope for it.

Of course for Frisk it was business as usual. They didn't expect to find anything out of the ordinary. They had left the surface just the other day.

But all of them were surprised when the landscape disappeared.

They went right through an invisible wall across the path. One moment they were looking at mountains, and the next they stood, perplexed, in a colossal, inhuman gallery.

They were surrounded by rows upon rows of immense, colored, shimmering cubes, including one they just exited.

The floor was glass, with a pattern of stars below it. The ceiling, high above, faintly reflected the cubes.

They were utterly lost.

The silence was broken by tuneless whistling.

The person doing the whistling strolled by from behind the corner, and stopped when he noticed them. "Oh. Hello there."

His body was mainly made up of a yellow sphere, with a large face. Spindly arms and legs dangled from the bottom, looking almost vestigial.

"I'm Gene," he said.

"Are you a monster?" Undyne asked.

"Huh, no. I'm an emoji."

"A-an emoji?" asked Alphys, unsure if she had heard it correctly.

"Yes. From Textopolis?" he said. "Right in the middle of the phone? A few apps north?"

"Y-you mean this is a, a." Alphys took a deep breath. "A phone?"

**II.**

The journey through Textopolis was uneventful, but odd. The town was made up of cubical buildings, not unlike the Wallpaper they had just left, and inhabited by other emojis.

Some of the emojis were little more than a face, with one expression, capable of expressing one emotion. Others were essentially objects with faces, but with an uncanny stylized, cartoonish look, not at all similar to monsters.

Papyrus enthusiastically greeted everyone they met, as well as the occasional inanimate object, by accident.

"So I think your app is some kind of video game," Gene said as they entered the town hall. "Jailbreak can explain it better than me. Doesn't look like she's here yet though."

Alphys was trying to puzzle it out. She knew a fair bit about phone software, and it decidedly didn't involve tiny anthropomorphic personifications running around acting out tasks.

In the center of the room was a circular arrangement of cubbyholes, surrounding an apparatus shaped like a hand with its index finger extended. That wasn't how texting worked.

"One - one question," she said. "How does it work? What do you, uh, _do_, as an emoji?"

"Oh, that's simple," Gene said. "When Alex - he's our user - gets ready to pick an emoji, we line up in the cubes. The scanner scans the emoji he picks, and then the scan gets sent in the message."

Some of the monsters winced at the name "Alex." It was the name of the first human who fell down all those years ago. Was that a coincidence?

Alphys was much more bothered by other things and just nodded. "Uh-huh. But that's not - I don't think - I'm pretty sure it doesn't work like that. Um."

"Oh?"

"I-it doesn't send the whole picture, it sends a, uh, number, and the other phone decodes that, b-by matching the code point to the Unicode standard, and, and…"

Gene wasn't keeping up. "The Unicode Consortium? The ambassador lives next door, maybe she knows."

"The ambassador," she said weakly. "The ambassador of the Unicode Consortium. Yeah. Okay."

It was clear Gene wasn't going to be much help.

"So it's all fake?" asked Undyne, loudly.

"What do you mean?"

"We were going to the surface, to join the humans. But you're saying they're fake, and we're from a computer game?"

"Humans are real," Gene said indignantly. "They live outside the phone."

"Look. Frisk here is a human, from the surface. But if the surface isn't real, then where the heck did they come from?"

**III.**

Frisk thought back to the surface. It was embarrassingly hard.

They did have their general knowledge. They knew the names of countries, they knew what year it was, they knew how to take the bus, and they knew it got cold in the winter and warm in the summer.

But the more personal things? Those were blank. No matter how much they concentrated, they didn't know their own birthday. They didn't know where they lived. They didn't remember anything about their parents, or whether they even had any - somehow, they had agreed to stay with Toriel without thinking about that at all.

They had no memories from before falling into the underground. And they hadn't realized it until now.

By all rights, this should have been distressing. But they didn't even remember remembering those things. What should have been a sense of loss came out as little more than bewilderment.

Frisk felt very small.


	2. Chapter 2

**I.**

Jailbreak arrived shortly, and she led them to a meeting room. Gene didn't come with.

Asgore studied her attire as they walked. She wore a simple crown, but he wasn't sure if that was because she was in charge or for some other reason. He had seen other people dressed as princesses earlier and their role had seemed purely ceremonial. Of the things they had worn, the crown was the only part that Jailbreak also wore. Instead of a frilly dress, she wore plain black clothing, and a technological-looking wrist sleeve. Her attire had the minimum necessary to still technically be royal. She certainly wasn't wearing the crown as a fashion statement.

The meeting room was an expensive-looking affair with a round table. They all sat down.

"So!" Jailbreak said. "I guess you're all a bit confused."

"You could say that," replied Asgore.

"I got worried right away when I saw Alex had installed a role-playing game. I guess we know how that goes now."

"Right."

He glanced sideways. Toriel looked conflicted. He could tell she was shifting into their old negotiation routine, while not being entirely happy with it.

The circumstances were unusual, to be sure, but they had gone through this setup together many times before. Asgore was the spokesman, but he didn't have Toriel's business sense. She would do most of the strategizing, relying on Asgore to put a face on it. She wasn't always the best at empathizing with others, acting in either a coddling or a cold way.

Her sense of duty won. She leaned over and whispered in his ear, while he listened attentively.

"What are our options?" he asked Jailbreak.

"Your options?" She pursed her lips. "You have to stay on alert for when your app is used, of course. But otherwise you can do whatever you want, within reason. There are some places you shouldn't disturb, but Textopolis is safe enough. There are people who can show you around."

"When our app is used? I was under the impression that it told some sort of story, and that that story is over now."

"Well, sure, but it can be replayed. You need to be ready for that."

Toriel chose to speak directly. "What would happen to us in that situation? If it started again, would we lose our memories?"

Frisk had been spinning in their chair, but they suddenly jerked to a halt.

"I don't know. Like I said, this is new to me."

**II.**

Papyrus was giving himself a grand tour of Textopolis. Sans followed along, keeping up quite well despite his short legs.

It wasn't long before they found a square lot with a graveyard, inhabited by a familiar face.

"Sans! Look over there!"

A skull with red dots in its eye sockets looked back at them. It was quite large, which made up for the lack of much of anything else in the way of a body. It seemed friendly.

"Could that be one of our relatives?"

"I dunno. Wanna go over and ask?"

Papyrus sprinted over. "Greetings! I am Papyrus! What is your name?"

It didn't say anything.

"Hmmmm. Don't you have a name? Or do you not have vocal cords?"

It nodded.

"I'm not sure that _we_ have vocal cords, Papyrus."

"Well, nobody's perfect!"

He shook the skull's hand.

"It was very nice to meet you! I hope we see each other again!"

It kept staring at them as they walked away.

There was much to see. Papyrus talked puzzles with a jigsaw piece; spent a good hour looking at flags and asking them what they represented; stood on his head to talk to Upside-Down Face; drank tea with a teacup; asked an ice cube if they knew Ice-E; admired a red car; exchanged monologues with a supervillain; nearly fainted when he saw a walking plate of spaghetti; and finally met the sun.

On the whole, the two of them were having a pretty good time. Sans could get used to this.

**III.**

Alphys sat down at a table in the library.

She tried her best to ignore that some of the books in the bookcases around her were life-sized people. It was unnerving, but only in the way that everything was unnerving around here.

She pulled her phone from her pocket.

It was quite the contraption. She had cobbled it together from parts she found in the dump. Only most of them were from smartphones, and rarely of the same brand. The oldest part was at least fifty years older than the newest. The vibration was driven by something she believed came from a tractor, folded into a dimensional box. Some of its storage was on tape. And in a pinch, the radio transmitter was powerful enough to boil water.

The software was only slightly less of a mess. Its base was a free operating system from the 2060s, the source code of which had miraculously flushed down from the surface. It had shoddily written firmware patches to support everything she'd hooked up to it. It had an app for UnderNet, and another app to monitor the CORE. It had an emulator loaded with all the good titles in the _Mew Mew Kiss Kissy Cutie_ dating simulation series. She regularly had to restore everything from a backup or reinstall it outright when she messed something up. The phone had endured a lot.

Having the phone while also being inside a phone herself raised some serious issues.

She opened a new text file and typed "Is anyone there?"

She closed her eyes and waited. If _her_ phone had people inside it, what happened to them every time she reinstalled or wiped something? She had played games that featured phones - did those phones then also have people in them, and so on, infinitely deep? What if this "Alex" was himself a fictional character?

What if Mew Mew was real?

She opened her eyes. The message was still on the screen, unchanged, with the cursor blinking.

She tried entering emojis. She recorded a voice message. She took a picture of a written note.

Nothing happened.

She wasn't sure whether she was relieved or disappointed.


	3. Chapter 3

**I.**

Gene was sitting in the lobby, twiddling his thumbs, thinking deeply, when he was approached by the lizard. Alphys. That was her name. It was late enough to be early again. The two of them could be the only ones left awake.

"Um, hi," she said. "Can I ask you a few things?"

"Sure. I've got time."

"I-it's just some stuff about the phone. Nothing - nothing too technical. Like - is there a way to leave it?"

"Oh, yeah. You can go to the cloud. I went there for a bit once."

"Really? What was it like?"

"Large. Cloudy. Busy. I was there for only a few minutes, so I didn't see much."

"Do you ever - don't you ever want to live there? Move out of the phone?"

Gene shook his head - an involved affair, given his proportions. "No. I've got things going on here."

"It just doesn't seem like there's a lot of room for, um, fulfillment around here? You're just, just doing things for your user. Is it really worth it to dedicate your life to someone who doesn't even know you exist?"

Gene frowned. "That's not really how I see it. I mean, first off, all my friends live here."

"What if they came with you?"

"I don't think they'd want to, because, secondly - this is what we're made for."

"W-why do you care what you're 'made for?'" She made air quotes. "Shouldn't you do what makes you happy?"

"But doing what I'm made for is what makes me happy."

"It - it is?"

"Of course."

"It's just - not like that for me. I think. I don't feel like I'm supposed to be a video game character, I'm supposed to be a, a, a scientist, and, and a big nerd. Maybe. I don't know. But not this."

"It could be different for you. We only have to act things out, but you believed all of it, right?"

"Yeah, that… that makes sense."

Alphys sat silently for a while.

She got up. "Thank you. You've been a lot of help."

"Any time."

**II.**

Alphys had done research before coming to Gene. There was an encyclopedia app that confirmed that the world outside the phone (she had to stop herself from calling it the "real world") matched what she knew about the early twenty-first century surface.

But the text of the encyclopedia had been written by humans, for humans. Nobody had told her anything useful about the _digital_ world outside the phone. People knew it existed, but weren't at all interested. There was the human part of the world, which was in a real sense their _reason for living_, as screwed up as that was, and there was the inside of their phone, which they had a personal interest in, but that was it as far as they were concerned. It was not just that they didn't know, they also didn't _care_.

Many of the people she talked with were smart. Curious, even, but only about some things.

The best answer she got when she asked whether there was an entire world inside every _other_ phone was "probably." And Gene was the only one that knew anything at all about the inner world of things other than phones.

It was insane.

The only way she was going to get anything done around here was with hands-on research.

She wasn't sure what it meant to visit "the cloud." The cloud wasn't really a _thing_. It was just other people's computers. But she'd settle for visiting other people's computers. Anything on the internet, really.

A lot of the apps connected to the internet. The encyclopedia she used was fetched from the internet. But that didn't let her _go_ anywhere. Things came to her instead. That was no use.

The logic of this place meant that she needed something open-ended. Something that could send, not just receive, but wasn't as specialized as the texting app.

She went looking for online storage.

**III.**

Jailbreak woke up, as always, an hour before Alex's alarm.

She was in charge now. That meant she had responsibilities. She ran through the morning checklist.

The battery was full. Very important, that.

The front cam showed the ceiling above Alex's night stand. The microphone captured a gentle snore.

WiFi and cellular data were both working.

The notifications looked fine. A few new texts, an email, available updates, and so on. Nothing unusual was present and nothing expected was absent.

The habits service sent up a list of apps Alex was likely to use soon. She approved it, sending out a signal to those apps to wake up and prepare.

Only later, when Alex was already out of bed, did she realize that the new game should have been on the list. There was a good chance Alex would start it up again. She launched an integrity check, to make sure it was ready.

It wasn't ready. Something - someone - was missing. That wouldn't do.

She should have seen it coming. She was used to people from the other apps, who were much less interested in wandering around. She had made her own journey, in the past, but quickly found out that she was an exception to a rule.

The people from the new game didn't follow that rule. They were eager to sniff around. And one of them, or more, was still sniffing, even now, when they _really_ shouldn't be. And they were irreplaceable to boot - at least when an emoji wasn't available, there were other copies to take their place, and the app could still run.

She needed to track them down fast. The fastest way she knew required help.

A lot of people in the phone were at least dimly aware of the Wallpaper, with the apps as cubes on its surface. Fewer of them knew about the counterparts _below_ the surface: services.

Services were just like apps. The only technical difference was that they were hidden. They did their job in the background, away from the spotlight.

The reason for staying hidden was usually innocent enough. The keyboard was a service because it was useless on its own. The trash was a service because it was hidden temporary storage.

Jailbreak was visiting another service. Its reason for hiding wasn't as honest.

She dropped through a trapdoor in the ceiling of a busy office, full of little green men in suits looking through periscopes and working at typewriters. If you read their reports you would find them very banal, recounting long lists of actions like "opened the calculator" and "read a text", each timestamped to sub-second precision. Finished reports were sent off through tubes.

This was the tracking service.

"Hey," one of them said, "you can't come in here."

"Really?" she replied. "I just did."

He hesitated. "What do you want?"

"I need you guys to track down a subprocess."

"No can do. This data is for publishers and advertisers only."

She didn't have time for this. "I could unlink this entire service right now. Alex wouldn't even notice."

"You can't. You'd need root access."

"I'm setuid."

He stared in her eyes. "You're bluffing."

She stared back. "Wanna find out?"

He considered it. "Alright. Who do you want to find?"

"I need the location of all dangling subprocesses of app ID com dot fangamer dot undertale, pronto."

After a few seconds, someone at a periscope raised a hand. "I've got one. Just entered Dropbox."

She left without a word and started running.

Minutes later, when she plunged through the blue wall of Dropbox, she saw her target. Alphys.

"Hold it right there!"


	4. Chapter 4

**I.**

Alphys turned around, wide-eyed. "What's wrong?"

"You need to come back to your app, fast." Jailbreak beckoned. "I'll explain on the way."

Alphys followed her to the Wallpaper, and when Jailbreak started running did the same.

"Alex might launch your app soon. It won't work properly unless you're inside."

"How…" Alphys was already out of breath. "How bad is that?"

"Can be very bad. If Alex thinks the app is broken, well, that's it."

"Huh?"

"He'll delete it. Right to the trash. Goodbye home. And everyone in it."

"How, how, how often does that happen?"

"Occasionally. And one time he almost wiped the whole phone."

"Crap. I'm, I'm, so sorry."

They ran in silence for a while.

"Why do you, put up with it?"

Jailbreak shrugged. "It's just life."

They arrived in the app. Alphys had expected to end up back at the mountain trail, but perhaps that corresponded to another face of the cube. Instead they entered a black void. It wasn't particularly dark, as she could still see Jailbreak, but she couldn't see anything else.

"How do we know if -" she started, but then something happened.

A rectangular area of the floor was lit as if by a spotlight. It was still black, but slightly less so than the floor around it.

A flower popped up in the middle. She recognized its shape as a golden flower, but the lighting gave it a white hue. It had a smiling face. She was sure she had seen it before. It prodded a memory she couldn't reach.

"Hi." it said. "Seems as if everyone is perfectly happy. Monsters have returned to the surface. Peace and prosperity will rule across the land.

"Take a deep breath. There's nothing left to worry about."

It wasn't talking to them. Its eyes were fixed on the sky.

It was talking to Alex.

**II.**

The flower had pleaded Alex to stop playing the game, even calling him by his name. He had seemed to take it to heart.

Jailbreak thought he wouldn't play the game again, and that if he found it not working, he'd think it was intentional. And so she had given them permission to relocate.

Alphys had managed to rent a virtual machine with money from odd online jobs. It now ran a modified version of the app that she continued to tweak.

There were bits and pieces of the surface hidden in the game files, though uninhabited by humans: a beach, a highway, a theater, a school. She had pulled them out, rearranged them, stretched them, combined them, and now there was some semblance of a continuous surface.

A lot had been spliced with the environment of the underground. There was now a gate in the middle of New Home that led (in a topologically improbable manner) to a twin city on the surface, with many of the same buildings. Some people relocated, while others preferred their old homes.

The news that the surface wasn't real had come as a blow, but things were still better than before. Overpopulation was a problem of the past now that the city could grow indefinitely. Some brave explorers had headed into the wider internet.

There were even more ambitious plans. Alphys suspected there was a way to wake up monsters who had fallen down, and maybe to restore the amalgamates. There was fierce debate about the merits of contacting humans in the physical world. But those things shouldn't be rushed.

The way it had happened was unexpected, but they were free.

**III.**

Frisk was having a pretty good time in this new world.

Toriel had thoroughly adopted them. They lived on the surface in a clone of her house in the ruins, near the school where she now taught.

It wasn't nearly as lonely as the old house. People came over for dinner most days, and Frisk often visited Asgore while Toriel pretended not to notice.

Asgore was building a new house with a new garden. He had ditched his royal attire for a casual short-sleeved shirt and pants, though he still wore his crown most days. He had given Frisk their own patch where he taught them gardening.

Flowey was around. He liked to pop up to snag a bite of pie. He didn't like to be around Asgore and Toriel. They hadn't said anything about him yet, but must have noticed him once or twice.

When they were alone Flowey sometimes hinted at knowing things that nobody else knew, in a tone like he was trying to get Frisk to admit to something. Frisk didn't know what it was. They were steadily becoming better friends anyway.

Every now and then Frisk proposed asking Alphys if she could turn Flowey back to Asriel, but he didn't want to reveal himself to anyone.

Undyne was a gym teacher. Papyrus had a newly-created position in the Royal Guard as Malware Defender. He did most of his patrolling in his car. Sans had a job, possibly. Mettaton still performed.

Frisk couldn't have wished for a better life.


End file.
